Cover Stream: A great Cover Flow iTunes controller

Cover Stream brings a Cover Flow browser for your music out of iTunes and into …

There's no question that Cover Flow is a killer way to browse one's iTunes music catalog. Cover Flow is the closest true music enthusiasts can get to thumbing through a stack of vinyls or CDs in the digital age, and it's a really purty way for the rest of us to actually see what albums we've collected over the years. In fact, this is such a great way to interact with music that Snarb decided to build an iTunes controller with Cover Flow as its centerpiece.

Cover Stream is billed as a tool to "[re]discover your music," and since a major new 2.0 version came out last month, I've found that to be quite the case. As an app that can live in the menu bar and/or the Dock, Cover Stream is primarily a Cover Flow-based iTunes browser with rich support for keyboard shortcuts. Users can sort Cover Stream's album order by artist or album, and a basic set of controls just below Cover Stream's Cover Flow view offer quick mousing access to iTunes' key controls. A number of other features allow users to display track change notifications (via Growl), show album artwork on the desktop, and even run Cover Stream full screen for the ultimate in jukebox-if-ying your Mac.

Upon first run, however, Cover Stream must "sync" with iTunes, presumably to create its own database for keeping track of album art and (possibly) playlists. For our 40GB+ music library, the cache file we found in Cover Stream's Application Support folder is only 432KB, so it isn't exactly copying all the album artwork image files over. We ran this initial sync on a quad core Mac Pro and it took mere seconds. If you constantly update your library with new music, however, you may want to enable Cover Stream's "sync with iTunes at startup" feature to make sure it can stay on top of your library.

Cover Stream also features support for Apple Remote and "scrobbling" the list of music you play to Last.fm, a social network centered around sharing your taste in music and discovering new artists.

A particularly useful feature is search-as-you-type support in Cover Stream's main Cover Flow window. Searching is usually pretty snappy, though if you're like me and you sometimes shuffle your entire library, Cover Stream has a particularly unfortunate Achilles' heel. If you search for a specific track while shuffling your entire library, selecting a specific track will hijack the shuffle to that track's album. This is a disjointing behavior that I've contacted Cover Stream's developers about, and they're considering a preference to toggle shuffling between albums and the entire library for a future release. No promises, but I really hope this feature makes it in.

Another complaint I have is that Snarb could do a bit better in providing 'help' and 'getting started' documentation. Neither, from what I can tell, are included with the app download or from its Help menu. Cover Stream's menu bar item provides quick links to the company's bug tracker and forums, but the only other way to find either of those links is through tiny, 9-point Lucida Grande type at the bottom of the Cover Stream site (even then, the bug tracker doesn't seem to be directly linked).

That said, I'm really digging Cover Stream and I run it at login now. As a long-time CoverSutra user, Cover Stream's admittedly "heavier" approach of using Cover Flow to control iTunes is a refreshing way to interact with my library without having to dive in and out of iTunes every time I want to play a track or select a new playlist. Even Cover Stream's menu-bar-based controller is a clever way to provide simple, unobtrusive control over iTunes. I hate to say it this way, but I'm definitely "[re]discovering" my music all over again, now that I have a far easier way to interact with the tracks and albums that my playlists are built from.

If you want to take Cover Stream for a spin around your library, you'll need Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and iTunes 7.5. A license costs €14.95, or about $23.50.